


Time Is Not a Web.

by AstroGirl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 05:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12905178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: Time is not a web.  But we are all caught up in it, regardless.





	Time Is Not a Web.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "careless talk costs lives."

Time is not a web.

The Time Lords like to think it is. They pretend they believe that it is, and that they are the spider at its center, keeping watch over an orderly pattern of temporal threads, repairing the rifts and tears and disturbances (often, of course, only after they have eaten the thrashing flies). Keeping the weave pristine and perfect and fundamentally unchanged despite the destructive interference of the cosmic equivalent of moths and leaves and small boys with sticks. 

But Time is not a web. It is also not, as someone once said, "a wibbly-wobbly ball of timey-wimey stuff." That, of course, is the kind of meaningless description one only provides to creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding the reality. And human minds cannot truly understand Time, not even with the aid of mathematics. Even Time Lords do not understand it nearly as well as they think.

Time is not a ball, and not a web, and the spiders are not distinguishable from the flies.

It works like this:

The Doctor steps into a coffee shop. His companion, tired and annoyed from a long day of running through corridors and being chased by cyborg monsters, has made it known that she will not set foot outside the TARDIS again until he brings her coffee. The good stuff, she says, not the unreliable product of the TARDIS's eccentric kitchens.

So here he is. A spider, a fly. A Time Lord billions of light-years away from Gallifrey, in a time that may be long before or long after the date of his own birth; he honestly doesn't know which. And while he would hardly agree, one could argue that this is not somewhere, or somewhen, that he belongs. Time might argue that, if it had a mind to. If it had a mind at all. Possibly it does; the Time Lords are not entirely certain on this point.

The Doctor studies the menu above the counter, considering his options. He critiques the logic of the names the shop uses to denote the various sizes of cup. He ponders a blend from Hawaii, reminiscing fondly about a long-ago visit with King Kamehameha. He regales the barista with a story about the time he toppled an empire with a carton of soy milk, and delivers a short, but mostly accurate, lecture on the effects of caffeine on the human vs. the Silurian brain. He asks for things that are not on the menu. In the end, he departs with a cup laden with incompatible syrups and topped with too much whipped cream, his companion's latte entirely forgotten.

The barista leads an uneventful life, certainly by the Doctor's standards, but also by his own. This ridiculous, probably insane customer is by far the most interesting thing to happen to him today. When his relief shows up to take the next shift, he stays a few minutes later than usual to recount his entertaining crazy-customer story. The two of them laugh and shake their heads. People, they agree, are strange. You never know who might come walking through the door.

A few minutes later, he is in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time when another driver, distracted by a text message from a rejected lover, runs a red light and plows into his car at deadly speed.

The barista is not an important person, except in the ways that all sentient beings are important. He is not a fixed point in time. None of his descendants was ever going to be the first human on Mars.

It would not be accurate to say that Time heals itself around his absence. Time is not a body, any more than it is a web or a ball. But Time does... something. Whether it changes itself to accommodate the disturbance of a Time Lord where a Time Lord, arguably, should not be, or whether it somehow propagates that accommodation backward, incorporating it into the timeless fabric of its origin... Well, that is a philosophical point that the Time Lords find debatable, although, if they concentrate hard enough when such things happen, if they look in the right place with the right senses, they can, perhaps, feel a shifting or shimmering in what they would wrongly think of as strands in a web.

The Doctor sips his coffee, makes a face, throws it out. He returns to his TARDIS. A moment later, he leaves again, enters a different coffee shop, buys a latte, and talks to another barista.

Or:

Somewhere far in that coffee shop's future, the Doctor is running through a museum. He is being chased by mummies that aren't mummies, by the articulated skeletons of dinosaurs that aren't dinosaurs. The details don't matter. What matters is the child.

She's twelve, which she believes makes her too old to cry, but she's crying anyway. She's lost sight of her mother, somewhere among the taxidermied deer and the holographic mammoths; there are screams and horrible, floor-shaking footfalls coming from down the corridor; and the interactive space exhibit that's the one thing she came here to see is in sparking, flickering ruins. She can feel the heaving, wailing sobs trying to force their way up from somewhere inside her chest, and once they start, she is certain they will never, ever stop.

The Doctor bursts into the room, skids to a halt, grabs her hand. He pulls her along, drags her out of danger. He surprises the sobs right out of her.

He hurries her down the corridor with him and into a half-ruined control room, where he gives her a strange, glowing gadget and shows her how to hold the monsters off with it while he does something – something mysterious and frantic and clearly vitally important – at a computer.

She does what she is asked. She waves the thing at the dinosaurs and the mummies and the other, weirder things that try to force their way into the room through a door that's already been ripped off its hinges. It hums and whines and glows, and they cringe and cower away from it as if it hurts their nonexistent ears. Some of them run. Some of them stop moving. 

She has power over them. She is not crying any more.

The Doctor finishes what he's doing, and everything instantly goes quiet. The lights in the creatures' eyes fade, and in a moment they are nothing more than rags and bones. She is brave, the Doctor tells her. She is smart. He could not have done it without her.

She believes him. She believes that she can fight monsters. 

Twenty years later, she leads a resistance against an alien invasion. They repel the monsters without the Doctor's help. 

She is not needed for this. Not personally. If she had been killed by a rampaging alien dinosaur skeleton, another fighter would have taken her place. If she had never defeated a mummy possessed by inconceivable alien energies, some other brave and smart young girl with some other defining experience would have stepped forward and succeeded. (Would have, or will, or does, or did. Tenses are as meaningless in these cases as metaphorical descriptions.) 

Time is like that sometimes. If Time has a mind, it is not one that cares much who its patterns are made of. Not unless it has to.

The Doctor would care, of course, if he knew. But he, too, is a strand in the web. No, a wibble in the ball. No, a... Well. Even he does not know for sure what he is, other than that he is a traveler in time and space. But he knows that you cannot interact with something without affecting it. Even the humans know that. Even the Time Lords do.

Sometimes, this particular Time Lord stops to think about all of this. Usually he doesn't. There are too many things that need affecting, after all. And so he carries on, events and changes constantly rippling out from him, unnoticed. 

Or not rippling, because Time is not a pond. Not a pond, or a web, or a ball, or a body. Time is made of people, and objects, and events, and choices. Time is made of us. And we are made, sometimes, of him.

It happens all the time. It is happening now. It has happened, almost certainly, to you.

That is what Time is.


End file.
